Interactive

Civilities is a modular, collective fiction that brings together some ten Montreal artists from a range of disciplines and backgrounds who offer diverse perspectives on “living together.” The invited artists explore potential spaces of confidence, reconciliation and the cohabitation of persons, peoples and religions. From the rules of religious fundamentalisms to the movements of anonymous crowds in the city, the projects examine various aspects of social organization, cultural norms and the collective spaces of shared practices. Working from interfaces representing public space, that of the community and of civitas, small stories emerge like windows onto more universal situations, onto a certain state of the world, somber and violent indeed.

Eva Quintas' project, Tirer, developed within the general structure of Civilities, deals with power and domination in the family. The family home, the space in which one first learns to live with others, is certainly the most sensitive place. Opening with an anecdote about a mother pulling a child a little too violently by the hand, the artist deals with the more general notion of everyday, insidious power and violence. How is power exerted within the limited group of the family. This theme is supported by spoken excerpts from Roland Barthes' Comment vivre ensemble?, a reflection on the relationship between power, domination, and individual rhythm: "master is he who sets the pace."

Cosmogonies(2002) - within the collective project
VilanovaIn september 2001, thirteen photographers from the collective FOVEA have exhibited their works in several stores and outdoor spaces of the Villeneuve street neighbourhood, between Saint-Laurent and Saint-Urbain, in Montréal. My project took place at the Laundromat Villeneuve, owned by an Indian family. The web version of Cosmogonies continues to link the cyclical world of laundry and Hindu iconography , but it also addresses the image and representation of women in India.Presentations :
- Festival du nouveau cinéma et des nouveaux médias de Montréal
(FCMM),Montréal, octo. 2002
- Net art open exhibition, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum (Turkey), sept.
2002
- FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), Sao Paulo (Brazill),
august 2002

Carnages, designed by Mitsiko Miller and Eva Quintas, comprises several levels of text, including Alice, which can be related more directly to the picture story. Straight out of a mime show, Alice and her assistants take part in a narrative thread strongly influenced by childrens stories, to which explicit reference is made, starting with the title. This account uses a parodic style to take us without ambiguity into the world of symbolism. The adoption of such a style might surprise us at the outset, but it shows unquestionable humour, which becomes darker and more complex as the story progresses. Indeed, this story, while linear in structure, superimposes itself on an underground space which the visitor enters when he engages in the corridors it opens. The succession of pictures, actually permeated from all sides through hyperlinks, leads to a bottomless well, a journey into the dark universe of anthropophagy, building a fascinating bridge between childrens stories and the history of humankind. The interest of the two artists for cultural diversity is shown here by an incursion into cannibalism, which leads them to push their investigation still further, as the Web allows, from one universe and one register to another without distinction. From fiction, the visitor thus moves suddenly to the documentary, which proves an abyss where the desire of the other becomes consumption, ingestion, digestion and annihilation, whether in the area of eroticism or cultural or territorial appropriation. Carnages is not without making allusion, by extension, to the voracious and sometimes malicious nature of the Web, and to the immense potential for appropriation that is digital technology.

Having produced a Web radio version of this photo-novel in 1998, the artists offered a CD-ROM version designed as a random fiction. PRoman, a software package developed specifically for this fiction by Alain Bergeron, randomly places fixed images, display effects, text, and sound effects, as a function of a viewing duration chosen by the user (from 15 to 120 minutes). Although its interface also allows for sequential viewing, LIQUIDATION on CD-ROM is presented primarily as a film whose plot changes each time it is viewed.

Liquidation,
une fiction web-audio(1998)The Web radio fiction was broadcast simultaneously on the Internet and by the Radio Canada FM cultural network on Fridays January 16, 23, and 30, 1998, during the program Les décrocheurs ... d'étoiles. On each of the broadcast evenings, events were organized in public sites in Montreal with projection of the Web site on a large screen and performances by the musicians who composed the sound track for LIQUIDATION: the group Papa Boa, the chorus Mruta Mertsi, and the musician Martin Tétreault.

On May 1, 2, and 3, 1998, the authors took over the Centre des arts actuels SKOL to present the prototype of the CD-ROM and the creative steps for the photo-novel. On this occasion, SKOL hosted a world première: the printing of 100 poetry books by Professor Morgan on rock-fibre paper! A recent discovery by Les Papiers Alexandrie.